Scale
The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and in Organisms, Cities, and Companies
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4.2 • 33 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"This is science writing as wonder and as inspiration." —The Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal
From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in.
Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term “complexity” can be misleading, however, because what makes West’s discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses.
Fascinated by aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science: West found that despite the riotous diversity in mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal’s circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient—and lives 25% longer. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism’s body.
West’s work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work’s applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail. The implications of these discoveries are far-reaching, and are just beginning to be explored. Scale is a thrilling scientific adventure story about the elemental natural laws that bind us together in simple but profound ways. Through the brilliant mind of Geoffrey West, we can envision how cities, companies and biological life alike are dancing to the same simple, powerful tune.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
West, a theoretical physicist and former president of the Santa Fe Institute, argues in this dense yet accessible work that there are simple laws that underlie all complex systems, whether organic entities or human constructs. Animals, plants, economies, cultures, cities, and companies are united by the fact that they come into existence, grow, mature, and decline. West's central conceit in studying these phenomena is scaling: how a system changes when its size changes. He finds that the answer is not obvious, but it can be expressed mathematically. For example, doubling an animal's size increases its energy requirements by only 75%, which remains true whether one looks at a mouse or a whale. The structures of civilization scale similarly, West shows, as he analyzes cities and corporations within this framework. He supports his evidence with a plethora of striking charts and graphs that are notable for their simplicity. Reducing biological and cultural systems to quantifiable data streams has become fashionable, if rightly contentious, but West turns up many fascinating paradoxes in this large, stimulating, and mostly lucid book of Big Ideas.
Customer Reviews
Excellent book about the integration of physics with biology
Scale is a description of work the author and his colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute have conducted over the past 20 years of how scaling equations describe animals, plants, cities and companies. While it is most comprehensive about past research of animals and plants, describing their growth, size and lifetimes; it also provides tremendous insights into cities and companies, while suggesting directions for further investigation and research. Highly recommended.